Tour de Force

Storyline

Several civilians have been captured when they tried to flee from Nogova.
One NATO rescue team that had been sent in, already failed.
It is your job now to liberate the civilians as well as the captured soldiers.
The first group of POWs is held at a camp in the country-side.
To reach the second group you have to take control of a ferry to cross the bay, and extract them from a convoy.
If you fail to ambush the convoy, you will have to take over the (heavily guarded) convoy destination point.

Technical Background

Created in Sept. 2002
The mission's priority is re-playability.
A lot of the enemy units are placed at random locations and use random waypoints, which makes predicting their behaviour or approach path nearly impossible.
Even though the storyline offers the objectives sequentially, they can also be finished in any order chosen.
There are several alternative ways of completing the objectives, and, even though one starts out without any armored vehicles, it is possible to utilize several that are around.
The mission can also be played at any time of the day (features dynamic lighting).

Another priority was realism. Enemy troops are positioned at locations that make sense.
They are not dropped into the middle of nowhere, just to surprise you, and won't jump into battle unless they have no other choice.
All units exist from the beginning of the game, and while some may be hiding out, none of them are created out of thin air, or 'teleported' into play when there's a need for them.
They are also not on alert status unless there's a good reason for it (e.g. your group has been spotted).
Some of them (only in Veteran mode) are rather smart, though. If you are detected by some enemy troops, others will use that information about your location and may try to sneak up on you from the rear.

Since friendly units are closely intermixed with enemy units, fire discipline is extremely important.
Even though the mission will not be aborted if friendly units are killed, the scoring system will assign severe penalty points for those instances.

There are also some significant differences in the mission, depending on the mode it's played in.
Some enemy units will only appear in veteran mode, and others will behave differently, depending on the mode selected.